Lumps from fat grafting

Thanks Rav hopefully it'll get reaborbed over time then. The areas about a 1cm otherwise I might ask my surgeon whether he thinks to leave or remove.

Hey Amy,yeah sure. I had 3 recon surgeries overall last year.

The first was the double lat dorsi. I was in hospital for about 8 days, because it's such a major surgery. I was on strong painkillers initially. I had a lot of tightness at the beginning but as swelling went down it was fine. I saw a physical therapist prior to the surgery and she gave me arm exercises from day 1 which I kept doing for a good 3 months after. I think it's really important to do the arm exercises to a t and to get on top of pain management from the start, to prevent any chronic pain down the line.

Overall I'm really happy with my results and my mobility is really good and the same really. I can swim, do yoga (some arm positions harder than others) well.

I had scarless lat dorsi so no back scars, which was great because I dont have any pulling in my back. My front scars have healed up nicely and faded to silvery lines.

I did a lot of rehab and I think it you are careful the first few months everything will heal well. I obviously feel different sometimes when I pull or push ( I can feel lat in my chest) but it's not horrible or anything, just a different sensation.

I also asked my surgeon to cut the thoracodorsal nerve, because I'd heard a lot of women who notice an embarrassing flinching of the lat muscle in their chest when moving. Mine was cut and I don't have this problem at all, which is great and there is no detrimental result from cutting it either. So maybe mention to your surgeon if you don't want the flinching.

My other two surgery's involved the implant exchange and finally nipple recon and fat grafting.

Most important thing with lat dorsi is sometimes you can get a little stiff esp as your other back muscles try to compensate. But just try to take things eas initially and then build up to the things you used to do. Good luck 😃

Yeah that’s fair enough and it’s good to do your research.

Initially I had a uni mascretomy at dx but from testing I always knew I had calcifications in the good breast, which although benign they said could turn later on.

So I lived as a uni for 1.5 year and to be honest I was quite happy, although I did want the good side removed at some point because I didn’t want to go through it all again.

I guess I really didn’t want to live completely flat, that’s scared me as I was only 34 at dx (now 37). Thats when I started to look at recon options.

I was limited to lat dorsi really as not suitable for the tummy ones and hardly any docs had specialised in the thigh one.

Luckily in Perth Australia, we do have the doc that created the scarless lat dorsi and he’d over of 200 of them so I knew I was in good hands. Initially I was very dubious about lat dorsi since I am an active person and I was worried about mobility.

When I read like you some of the threads on this site, it really freaked me out. But i met 3/4 ladies through a support group who’d gone through the procedure and all were fine. I think because I'm younger too it was more of an issue for me..if I'd been in my 60/70s I might feel different. It is a major op and I do feel like being younger it was tough, but I got through it fairly well. I know my surgeon wouldn't do the op on ladies over 50 because he just feels the recovery is so much harder. It's difficult to surmise why some people's results don't work out...could be surgeon isn't as skilled, a blotched job or the patient doesn't follow up on physical therapy..

As you say, you have been through a lot and there's no rush, you could leave it 2 years and decide you're quite happy or that you actually want to get it done. I feel leaving a gap (in my case 1.5 year) after treatment was so good, it allowed my body to recover a bit more.

Other options I looked at were fat grafting to recreate a whole new boob, unfortunately it's very new in Australia and not the norm yet. Although I feel this could be the future. Using your known fat and not moving muscles around.

The other one was using animal fat/muscle with a mesh, sounded very futuristic. A few of ladies here have had it done, but because I had radiation on one side, there is a higher risk of it going wrong on that side, due to the body rejecting the animal fat/muscle. But again this method doesn’t use your own muscles.

There are interesting and new recon options all the time, so if you're not keen on lat dorsi, who knows what will be the norm in 2/3 years...